Terence Tao

I would definitely not want this to become part of your 10-year review or something.

But I mean, I think already in enterprise computing, people do use some of these metrics frequently.

as part of the assessment of performance of an employee.

Again, this is a direction which is a bit scary for academics to go down.

We don't like metrics so much.

Yeah, I think it's interesting to study.

I mean, I think you can do studies of whether these are better predictors.

There's this problem called Goodhart's law.

If a statistic is actually used to incentivize performance, it becomes gamed, and then it is no longer a useful measure.

Oh, humans, always gamed.

Yeah, I know.

I mean, it's rational.

So what we've done for this project is self-report.

So there are actually standard categories from the sciences of what types of contributions people give.

So there's this concept and validation and resources and coding and so forth.

So there's a standard list of 12 or so categories.

And we just ask each contributor to, there's a big matrix of all the authors in all the categories, just to tick the boxes where they think that they contributed.

And just give a rough idea, you know, like, oh, so you did some coding and you provided some compute, but you didn't do any of the pen and paper verification or whatever.

And I think that that works out.

Traditionally, mathematicians just order alphabetically by surname.